SOME LITTLE HISTORY.
It is very difficult to make an American understand the Irish question,
for the simple reason we have nothing parallel to it in our own country;
for which every American should thank his Heavenly Father, who cast his
lines in such pleasant places.
Whenever you speak to an American about the woes and wrongs of Ireland
he at once says, "Why does the Irish farmer sign a lease which he knows
he cannot live to?" "If he don't like the country and the laws, why
don't he get out of it?" "Why is it, the country being under one
government, that the English farmer and the North of Ireland farmer are
prosperous, while the South of Ireland farmer is in a state of
discontent?"
The trouble with the man who asks these questions is, he doesn't know
anything about the subject. He measures everybody's grain in his
half-bushel. He supposes that under English government, as in America,
there is one law which obtains everywhere, and under which all men are
equal.
I shall try to make it plain how a farmer in one part of Ireland may be
prosperous, and in another poorer than the pigs he fattens.
To understand this matter it is necessary to go back some hundreds of
years. All grievances took root a long way back--the world has got too
wise to commence or tolerate any new ones.
Originally Ireland was an independent kingdom; in fact, five independent
kingdoms. Under the kings were the clans. The Clan O'Connor, for
instance, held a certain amount of land--not each man an owner in fee
simple, but in common. That is to say, the ownership of the soil was in
the clan as a community, each family of the clan holding its land
forever, and that land was distributed among them as the best interests
of the clan dictated. The chief of the clan was elected, and he was
their general, their counsellor, their judge, their advisor,
philosopher, guide and friend. He was the father of the clan.
[Illustration: AT WORK IN THE BOG.]
To support the dignity of his position, and to bear the expenses of the
post of honor put upon him, a tribute was paid to him, based upon the
land held--so much per acre. It was very light, for the chief farmed
land, as did the clansmen; and there was, for the time, a fair degree of
prosperity in the island--as much as could be expected for that day and
generation. At least everybody had all they could eat, drink and wear.
[Sidenote: CONQUERING AND DISTRIBUTING.]
The English wanted Ireland, and England did with Ireland as it has done
with every country it ever desired to possess. She simply measured
bayonets, and, finding her bayonet the strongest, took possession. This
work was begun by Henry II., but received a great impetus from Henry
VIII., the brute who was so handy at decapitating his wives, and it was
followed up vigorously by succeeding kings and queens.
The country was conquered, the chieftains were expelled, the land was
divided up among the favorites of the English kings, and the people
found themselves tenants at will of a foreign proprietary, instead of
being actually owners in fee simple of their own land.
England never does an injustice by halves. She is very moderate in the
matter of mercy and justice, and things of that nature, but when it
comes to robbery and spoliation she knows no middle way. When Elizabeth
determined upon occupying Ireland, the orders were to spare neither man,
woman nor child.
The chiefs were driven out, and the land of the clans was distributed
among the favorites of the English court. Sir Walter Raleigh had
forty-two thousand acres given him from the estate of the Munster
Geraldines, and a proclamation was made through England, inviting
"younger brothers of good families" to undertake the planting of the
land from which the Irish--the owners and occupiers of the soil--had
been killed or driven off, and the repopulation of the country, "none of
the native Irish to be admitted."
Under this invitation, which the English robbers were not slow to
accept, scores of estates were given to the dissolute nobility of
England, who were willing enough to take possession of land which they
got for nothing, and which would give them means to dodge the primal
curse of labor. What they wanted was to live as they wanted, by the
sweat of other men's brows, and British bayonets gave the means.
It is not possible to detail the outrages perpetrated upon this
unfortunate people by the kings and queens of England, but let it
suffice to say that a wholesale system of spoliation, robbery, and even
extirpation, was inaugurated and most relentlessly and rigorously
pursued. Man, woman and child, and even the animals that could not be
driven off and sold, were destroyed.
There never was, in the history of the world, a record so black with
infamy, so red with blood, or so scarlet with injustice.
[Illustration: SOME OF THE DUKE OF LEINSTER'S KILDARE TENANTS.]
[Sidenote: THE QUESTION OF LEASE.]
This is the way England obtained possession of Ireland. This is the
title by which My Lord This, and My Lord That, holds the lands he
exacts rent for to-day. This is his deed to the property upon which five
millions of people are eating two meals of potatoes a day, that he may
gamble and keep mistresses in London and Paris.
"Why does he sign a lease, the conditions of which he cannot fulfil?"
There are no leases. It is not as it is in America, where the tenant and
the landlord come together, and bargain and wrangle over the terms, and
when an agreement is arrived at both are bound by the terms thereof.
There is no lease, no writing, no courts, except for the landlord. The
tenant is born upon the ground which British brute force, the only
principle there is in British government, robbed him of. The new
landlord enforced upon him by the pikes of Elizabeth's banditti, said to
him, "The rent of this land will be one shilling an acre." He could go
nowhere else. He knew no other country, and so he bowed his head and
built with his own hands a cabin--in the subjugation the old homes were
entirely destroyed--and went to work upon land, forty acres of which, in
its natural state, would not pasture a goat.
Before it had any value whatever the bog had to be cut off, the stones
dug out--in short, the land had to be made. They call it "reclaiming."
The tenant has no lease. He is purely and simply in the power of the
landlord. Whatever rent the landlord chooses to exact, that is the rent
he must pay. He is a tenant at will--and the will is the will of his
landlord, the English robber who lives in luxury in London and Paris,
and permits himself to be fleeced by sharpers, who, differing from the
English, use finesse instead of force. In brute force the English cannot
be excelled; when it comes to decent robbery, the kind of robbery where
the victim has some sort of compensation in the knowing that it was
accomplished by superior acumen, the English are babies.
The tenant--the robbed farmer--for his own sake is compelled to go on
and reclaim the land; he must raise something, for he has children who
must be fed; and so he digs out the rocks, and cuts the bog, and makes
good, arable land out of what was a barren and dreary waste.
What happens to him then? Why, My Lord in Paris has a subordinate
watching his tenant. There is nothing so mean that there is not
something meaner. Cruel as My Lord is, he has a crueller man under him.
And that is My Lord's agent. He comes to the miserable holding, and he
notices that Pat has reclaimed an acre more this year. Immediately he
says to Pat, "Your rent next year, my fine fellow, will be advanced."
[Illustration: TENANT FARMER, COUNTY MEATH.]
[Sidenote: SOMETHING TO BE CONSIDERED.]
What can Pat do? Nothing. He can't get off the land, for the merciless
exactions of My Lord, who is living in Paris and London, have left him
nothing; he cannot get away; he has no title to possession a minute; he
can be evicted from his holding at any time, for any one of a thousand
causes; there are no courts he can appeal to, as in America, for the
magistrates are all landlords. And so he bows his head, and meekly goes
on and reclaims more land, only to have the rent raised for every acre
made valuable by the labor of his own hands; until, finally, it comes to
a point where he has reclaimed the entire holding, and My Lord's agent
comes to the conclusion that it is better for him and My Lord--their
interests are identical--to convert the farm into a sheep-walk, and Pat
is evicted--which is to say, he is thrown out upon the roadside to
starve, with his wife and children; and the cabin he has built is torn
down.
Does he get anything for the making of the land? Not a halfpenny. All
the labor bestowed upon that land, originally his, goes to My Lord,
whose mistresses in London and Paris need it. They must have their silks
and velvets, they must have their wines and carriages, and horses and
servants--and Pat must pay for it.
It must be understood that there is no such thing as leases in the South
and West of Ireland--the landlord dictates the terms, and the tenant
must accept them. He has no alternative. He cannot get away; he has
nothing to get away with. As to the difference between the farmer of the
North and South of Ireland, it is not true that the farmer of the North
is a wonderfully prosperous man, but it is true that he is better off
than the farmer of the South. Why? Because there is not one law
governing the whole country. The "custom" that governs one section does
not govern the other.
Now, please, get this infamy in your mind, and try to comprehend it. The
British government actually drove the Irish, which is to say the native
owners of the soil, out of the North of Ireland into the South. The
phrase "To hell or Connaught" had its origin in this. It was to
Connaught that these people were condemned to go, the alternative being
death.
Of course no American can understand why anybody should go to any place
that he does not want to go, America being a free country. But the
American must understand that England is not a free country; that the
corrupt and vicious nobility of England wanted ground upon which they
could commit piracy, and that they had the entire power of the British
government behind it. The English bayonet is a rare persuader,
especially when it has the stolid cruelty and the iron will of a
Cromwell behind it. Let a man like Oliver Cromwell breathe upon a
bayonet, and you may reasonably expect to see a baby impaled upon it in
a minute. To have satisfied his ambition, and what he, in a mistaken
way, considered his duty, he would have burned his mother.
It was considered necessary to have an English garrison in the land. To
accomplish this the Irish were driven out of the North of Ireland, and
when I say driven out, I mean driven out. They were forced to go, man,
woman and child, into the wilds of Connaught.
Then the land vacated by this exodus, at the end of a bayonet--British
rule always means bayonet, British statesmanship begins and ends with a
bayonet, that being the only thing in the world that does not
think--this land was divided up among the dissolute villains who
infested the British Court, and for whom, they being the alleged sons of
nobles, something must be done.
But a condition was attached to these grants of stolen lands. No native
Irishman was to have a holding there. It was considered necessary that
there should be in Ireland a garrison of what they chose to call "loyal"
citizens, to hold the robbed and outraged Irish who had been driven into
the South in check. Therefore the North of Ireland was given to the
dissolute younger sons of dissolute English Lords, upon condition that
their tenants should be English or Scotch, and in all cases Protestants.
[Illustration: IN A DISCONTENTED DISTRICT.]
[Sidenote: "CUSTOM."]
To get English or Scotch farmers to join in this wholesale brigandage,
there had to be some inducement held out. They were not compelled to
come upon the ground, and they made their bargain with the Lords. They
insisted upon fixity of tenure, a low rent and free sale, which is to
say they would not enter upon these stolen lands except upon a low rent,
and if they made improvements they should have the benefit thereof, and
if they chose to quit the lands they should have the right to sell the
improvements they had made, and that the improvements should be a part
of the value of the lands, and their interest therein should be an
interest in law and equity.
This was agreed to, and on these conditions the North of Ireland was
settled by English and Scotch Protestants; the "custom" known as "Ulster
custom" was established, and is law to-day.
[Illustration: PROTECTING A GENTLEMAN FARMER.]
But "Ulster custom" does not extend over the entire island. While the
farmer in Ulster has fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale, the
farmer of Cork and Tipperary has nothing of the kind. He is a simple
tenant at will. He holds a farm at the will of his landlord; his life is
in the hands of a dissolute scoundrel who has no brains, backed by a
dissolute scoundrel in the form of an agent who has brains, and both of
these scoundrels are backed by the bayonets of the most infamous
government on the face of the earth.
"Ulster custom" gives the tenant some rights. "Cork custom" is quite
another thing. "Ulster custom" was a bribe. "Cork custom" is robbery. It
is a system of wholesale confiscation of labor, of body and soul.
The farmer of Cork and Tipperary has nothing to say about himself, his
wife or his children. If the son of the thief who stole his land loses
money at bacaret in Paris, he telegraphs the other thief, his agent,
that he wants money, and the secondary thief, who has a percentage in
the robbery, goes about among the tenants, and raises the rent. And that
is all there is about it. The tenant farmer has no lease. He lives upon
the land at the pleasure of his landlord, and the measure of the rent he
pays is the measure of the landlord's vices and the agent's
expectations.
Each county has its own "custom," and the poor, robbed slave lives under
that custom. The North of Ireland farmer comes nearer to keeping body
and soul together than the South of Ireland farmer, because the villain
robbers who expelled the Irish from the North of Ireland had to make a
custom more favorable to get the Scotch and English to go there to keep
the Catholic Irish in check, and they would not have gone to the country
except for some advantage. An English lord will do anything mean for the
love of it--the Scotch are altogether too acute to do a mean thing
without being paid for it.
An instance, not a very large one, but enough to illustrate the power of
the landlord over his victim, the tenant, occurred upon the estate of My
Lord Leitrim, who is this minute where I hope never to go if there is a
hereafter.
This worthy descendant of a very unworthy race had an industrious
tenant, whose farm he had been long coveting. But somehow he did not
dare to take it by force, with the feeling there was in the country at
the time, and so he sought a legal pretext. An Irish tenant is not
permitted by the paternal government, under which he starves and goes
naked, to make any improvements without the consent of the landlord. He
cannot build an addition to his cabin (this condition is unnecessary,
for he couldn't if he would), he cannot dig a ditch or do anything. This
is the law, but it has never been enforced, for in the very nature of
things the tenant would not do more than was profitable to himself for
the improvement of the land is the enrichment of the landlord, who
religiously raises the rent with every improvement made.
[Sidenote: A FOILED LANDLORD.]
This tenant needed a ditch preparatory to the reclamation of a bog
farther back, and he had been putting in all his spare time for two
years digging it. He did not suppose that My Lord would object to his
reclaiming the bog.
[Illustration: THE FILLING OF THE DITCH.]
One Saturday Mike was working in the ditch up to his knees in water when
My Lord came riding by. He saw his opportunity. He knew the law.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Making the drain, sor," replied Pat, proudly, for it was a big thing he
had undertaken.
"Who gave you permission to make a ditch on my land?" demanded My Lord.
"My fine fellow, you have that dirt all back by Monday morning, or out
you go."
Mike saw the trap he had fallen into. Before striking a spade he should
have gone to My Lord's agent, and got permission. But he was in for it,
for he knew that My Lord had a legal excuse to rob him of his years of
labor.
But the next morning he went to the chapel, and interviewed the priest.
The priest asked:--
"If you get that earth back by Monday morning, will you hold the land?"
"Unless the ould--that is--My Lord doesn't kape his worrud."
"We'll try whether he does!" said the father.
And so the sermon that morning was a very short one, and mostly devoted
to Mike's case. At its conclusion the father asked every man in the
parish to come at once with his spade and put that earth back. They
came--thousands of them--and they wrought with a will, and long before
Monday morning the drain was filled up as nicely as possible; and when
My Lord came riding by again to see the drain, and give orders for the
eviction of Mike, he found that his cruel alternative had been
fulfilled, as if by fairies.
An Irishman in Corduroy knee-breeches, with a spade in his hand and a
short clay pipe in his mouth, would not make a very happy stage fairy,
but he was a very serviceable fairy to Mike.
Had Mike not been so assisted he would have been evicted, and there
would have been no appeal from it. He couldn't employ counsel to fight
his battle, for he had nothing with which to pay counsel, and the
Justice would be a landlord anyhow, who had other Mikes to evict, and so
Mike would have never gone into court at all, but would have accepted
his fate in silence.
A cheerful state of affairs, surely.
And speaking of the possibility of paying rent, I remember a young man
on the Galtees, insufficiently clad (that was nothing new), working for
dear life in a soaking rain.
"How many hours do you work?" I asked.
"From daylight to dark, sor," was his answer, first peering around
before speaking, to be sure that no one heard him. In free Britain it is
dangerous for him to talk even of so small a matter as wages.
"And what are your wages?"
"Ten pence a day, sor."
"Are you satisfied to work for so many hours for so little money?"
"Troth, sor, it wuld be betther for my ould mother if I cud get that the
year around."
[Sidenote: A BIT OF HISTORY.]
Ten pence is about nineteen cents; and understand he was not boarded.
Out of that pittance he had to furnish his own food and his own bed. And
yet he would have been thankful to the man who would have given him
steady work at that price.
To know something of what landlordism really is, and how it all came
about, read the following little history of the Barony of Farney:
In 1606 Lord Essex, who had "obtained" a grant of the Barony of Farney,
leased it to Evar McMahon, at a yearly rent of two hundred and fifty
pounds. And this was a mighty comfortable rent, for, understand, under
the _Crown_ grants the one receiving it was only charged for arable
land, the bog and mountain land adjacent, then esteemed worthless, being
thrown in.
[Illustration: READY FOR EMIGRATION.]
McMahon sub-let it to poorer men, and they so improved it that, fourteen
years later, the same land was let for one thousand five hundred pounds,
and in 1636 thirty-eight tenants were compelled to pay a rental of two
thousand and twenty-three pounds.
Under the strong hands of the original owners, the robbed peasantry, who
found themselves tenants on their own lands, this piece of property was
mounting up in value very rapidly.
The Earl of Essex died in 1636 A.D. "His" estate went to his sisters.
There is in English families always somebody to inherit, and in case
there should not be, the Crown steps in and takes it, that the proceeds
of the robbery may not go out of the race. The two sisters married and
had children, of course, and in 1690, when the two came together to
divide their plunder, it was found that the rentals had risen to
twenty-six hundred and twenty-six pounds. Then the rents began to be put
up so as to produce something like.
The two daughters had children to be educated and provided for,
marriages were getting to be common in the family, and the debts of the
youngsters had to be paid. And so in 1769 this estate, which started so
modestly at two hundred and fifty pounds, yielded eight thousand pounds.
How? Easily enough. The land in this stolen estate, as I said, was
nine-tenths of it bog and stone, and only the arable land, some
twenty-five hundred acres, was set down in the lease, all the bog and
mountain adjacent for miles around being thrown in. By judiciously
evicting the tenants from the arable land and converting it into cattle
and sheep walks, and compelling the tenants to go upon the bog and stone
land, which they were compelled to reclaim and drain, the original
twenty-five hundred acres of arable land silently grew into twenty-four
thousand six hundred acres, and fifty-seven families had multiplied to a
population of twenty-three thousand eight hundred!
Can there be any way of making a great estate so delightful as this? It
is a pleasant thing to have a government steal land and give it to you,
and then protect you with bayonets while you are compelling the original
owners to improve it for you.
Bear in mind this fact. The plunderers never put a penny upon this land.
They never dug a ditch, dug out a stone, or cut a square foot of bog.
The cabins the tenantry lived in they built themselves, and every
improvement, great and small, they made themselves.
And this process of swindling, robbing, confiscation, spoliation and
plunder went on until this estate, which commenced at two hundred and
fifty-nine pounds in 1606, now yields the enormous revenue of sixty
thousand pounds, or three hundred thousand dollars per annum!
[Sidenote: THE YOUNG MAN BOYLE.]
Which is to say, the laborers on this estate have been yearly robbed of
their labor, and starved and frozen, that one family in England may live
in wasteful luxury. This is all there is of it.
About the same time that Essex got his grant, Sir Walter Raleigh got a
grant of forty-two thousand acres (exclusive of bog and waste) from the
plunder of the Earl of Desmond's estates. There lived in London at the
time a young lawyer named Boyle, who was probably the worst man then
living. He had been a horse thief, a forger, and murder had been charged
to him. Raleigh was in prison and wanted money, and Boyle offered him
one thousand five hundred pounds for his grant, which Raleigh accepted.
Boyle paid him five hundred pounds on account, and promptly swindled him
out of the balance.
[Illustration: OLD BUT TOLERABLY CHEERFUL.]
Boyle being serviceable to the court (such men always are), was created
Earl of Cork, and got from James I. patents for his plunder. Then he
proceeded to marry his children into noble English families, the Duke of
Devonshire being one of the descendants. One small portion of the estate
now yields His Grace an annual income of thirty thousand pounds, being
only a part of the land for which his ancestor, the horse-thief, forger
and murderer, paid five hundred pounds.
His Grace, the Duke, is not content with the land. Under some clause in
the patent given by the pedantic James to the criminal Boyle, he claims
the right to the fisheries in the Blackwater, and the Irish Appellate
Court, an English landlord's institution, as are all the courts, sustain
the claim, and he levies tribute upon every fish drawn from the waters.
If it were very certain that there is no hereafter, and if a man had no
more heart than an exploded bomb shell, it would be a very good thing to
be a duke, with a forger and horse-thief for an ancestor. The duke was
very judicious in the selection of a father.
The English landlord found after a while that sheep and cattle raising
was more profitable than diversified farming, and with that calm,
sublime disregard of the rights of the people which is characteristic of
the ruling classes in England, eviction became fashionable. The policy
pretty much all over Ireland was to clean out the population and
consolidate a thousand small farms into one large one.
Between the years 1841 and 1861, twenty years, there were destroyed in
Ireland two hundred and seventy thousand cabins, representing a
population of one million three hundred thousand, all driven to the
workhouse, to exile or death.
The process was a very simple one. A process of eviction was served, the
tenant and his family would be pitched out into the road, and the
cottage be leveled to the ground. This was originally done with
crowbars, but crowbars were too slow. A mechanical genius, who was a
landlord and had a great deal of eviction to do, invented a machine to
facilitate the process. It was an elaborate arrangement of ropes, and
pulleys, and iron dogs, and all that sort of thing, which could be run
up beside a cabin and tear the miserable structure down in a few minutes
and save a great deal in the way of labor.
This is the only labor-saving machine Irish landlordism has ever
produced.
Any system that does not permit the marriage of two persons of sound
bodies and minds and of the proper age, is an infamy that should be
wiped out at no matter what cost, and no matter what means.
[Sidenote: BANTRY VILLAGE.]
I was walking down a street in Bantry, when I came to a little grocery
store, with a ladder projecting over the wretched
[Illustration: AFTER A WHOLESALE EVICTION.]
sidewalk. My Lord Bantry, who owns, or professes to, every foot of the
ground in the village, is not willing to put the sidewalks in good
order. His tenants, who pay him ground rent, built their own homes and
are expected to build the sidewalks and keep them in order if they want
them. Otherwise they may walk in the mud. My Lord Bantry has his
carriage, but he never drives through the village. He does not like to
see distress.
This grocery was the property of an old lady of seventy, and perched on
the ladder was a girl of about seven teen--her grandchild. She was using
a paint brush as vigorously, if not as skillfully, as any male painter
that ever lived.
We halted a minute and greeted her. Unclosing a pair of very rosy lips
and showing a magnificent row of teeth (it might have been a pride in
the teeth that made her open her mouth so wide, but, if so, it was
pardonable!), she exclaimed:
[Illustration: THE "FIRSHT FAYMALE PAINTHER IN OIRLAND!"]
"I am the firsht faymale painther in Oirland! Have ye a job ye can give
me?"
And she laughed a very cheery laugh at the little pleasantry.
There was with us a boatman whom we had employed for a sail on the bay.
As we passed, he looked back with a pleased expression.
"Nancy, there, on the ladther, is my gurl."
[Sidenote: THE BOATMAN AND NANCY.]
We congratulated him on his good fortune, for Nancy was a bright,
handsome, buxom, cheery girl, who was just the kind that such a man
should marry.
"You are to marry her?"
"Yes, some time."
"Why not now?"
"Marry her now! What on? She has her grandmudther to care for, I have my
fadther and mudther, and there is but little boating to do, and the rint
is to pay jist the same. I have lived in Ameriky, and want to get back,
but I won't go widout Nancy, and God knows whin I shall git enough to go
wid her."
"Why don't you marry her and take the chances."
"Niver! I'll niver marry a gurl and bring childher into the world to go
through what we have had to. I've seen enough of it. My fadther has been
upon the place all his life and his fadther afore him. They made the
land they wuz born upon, and the rint has bin raised rigularly, lavin us
jist what we could git to eat, and now at sixty-five and bad wid the
rheumatiz, so that he can't work half the time, he has nothing. I went
away to sea, and got to Ameriky, but I had to kim back to take care of
him and my mudther, and it's all I kin do to keep 'em from bein'
evicted. An Amerikin gev me the boat, which he had built for the season,
and if it wuzn't for wat I make out of it we would all be in the
workhouse. I'll never marry Nancy till I kin find some way to git to
Ameriky, and some way there to make a dacint livin'. I will niver marry
and settle here, to see Nancy and her childher kim up as I kim up, and
me livin' as my fadther and mudther is livin'."
"And Nancy?"
"It's hard on the poor gurl, for there are any quantity uv the byes who
wants to marry her, but she, with her grandmudther on her hands, knows
all about it, and she has sense enough to wait for something to toorn
up. It will come, we hope, some day; but it's weary waitin'."
And so the two, who in any other country would be wedded and have a
cottage of their own, with plenty to eat, and drink, and wear, two who
owe the world by this time at least three chubby urchins, the girls like
their mother and the boys like their father, are kept apart by this more
than inhuman system of landlordism, which is the bottom, top and sides
of Irish misery. Others who never knew what it was to live better, would
marry and would add to the eternal roll of paupers that make up the
population of Ireland; but a residence in God's country unfitted this
man for that. He discovered that man's natural inheritance was not rags,
and filth and starvation, and he determined not to marry till he could
get, somehow, to the country where that crowning achievement of the
devil's most astute prime minister, a landlord, is unknown.
[Illustration: OLD AND NOT CHEERFUL.]
But the poor fellow will have to wait a long time. He is like a bear
chained to a post--he can neither fight nor run. My Lord has a mortgage
on him, and My Lord's agent will never let up on him so long as there is
a penny to be squeezed out of him. What to My Lord is Nancy and her woes
or her hopes? He would be willing she should marry and multiply and
replenish the earth, for it would give him more muscle to enslave in
time, or rather, the young lord who is riding by on his gaily
caparisoned pony, with two flunkies after him, would, when he came into
the estate, have the children of the boatman and Nancy to fleece, as the
present lord fleeces Nancy and the boatman. But as for his having any
care for the welfare of Nancy and the boatman, that is preposterous. The
cost of the trappings of the young lord's pony would make them
comfortable, but he would be a bold man who would suggest such a thing
to him.